In response to an eBay auction for the pencils to the alternate cover for Daredevil 500 as drawn by Geof Darrow that claims the original inked version is owned by someone at Marvel I thought I would show that I actually own the inked cover. I bought it from Geof at the San Diego Comic-Con 3 years ago or so when it is was at that time a cover to a Daredevil trade paperback that Marvel refused to use.

I still think the FS has no meaning as I explain in my blog post: http://www.unovis.com/index.php/archives/24 . Rather it is the epilogue to the series since the producers need to keep dramatic interest until the last minutes of the last episode and will have no time to show what happens to the characters. So the FS will serve as that purpose.

Having Sayid’s episode first and showing how the fight in the restaurant occurred and that he rescues Jin caused the Jin episode to be dramatically void. However, the Sayid episode could be thought of as a foreshadowing of what would occur in this episode. Much like how I believe the FS is a “foreshadowing” of how the epilogue to Lost will be. I think the creators were using this device in the Sayid/Jin story as a device to get people comfortable with the next shift when the FS becomes the new reality.

Will they explain how everything works? I doubt they will. They will cause Jacob/MIB to not exist and I think the plot will be satisfactory in that we see how we got to that point and then we know from the FS how everything turns out. But because Jacob/MIB won’t exist in the new timeline they won’t have to explain what might have happened. What bad thing MIB would have done… How would he have done it…. All these questions will be pointless when they don’t exist. Is this going to piss us off? I am not sure. Sure we would want to know what was going to happen. But much like any other fictional story where the bad person is bad because he is going to do something, we never see what they MIGHT because the hero always stops them before it happens. We are satisfied with the story and how it got to the conclusion and the climax that causes the badness to go away without having occurred. Moreover, I think had they tried to explain it any further some would like it and some would not. So if they can end it without having to get to the point where they need to show it then they can leave the mechanics of what would have occurred and how to our imaginations.

As for what triggers the FS to become the new reality I am not 100% sure.The story will culminate with someone (last candidate?) making a choice and causing some event back in time to cause the Jacob/MIB events to not occur. This changes all of the future from that trigger event forward. And it causes no contradictions in as much as the current reality will have occurred. (What happened, happened). This will be just like Back to the Future where MJF DOES exist and do things in 1985 but goes back in time and causes things to change from 1955 onward thus causing him to NOT exist. In Lost, the stuff we have already seen did and does occur, someone goes back in time or causes an event back in time that causes Jacob/MIB to not do their thing (or some other such plot device) and this causes the entire time shift to occur. And this implies there is no inherent meaning between the two timelines. They are not running in parallel nor are they linked in any way. The FS is just the changed timeline from the trigger event onward. And the trigger is NOT Jughead. The bomb did not destroy the island. BTW My prediction is the series will end with them boarding the plane in Australia and Jack lying back in his seat and the show ends on his eye closing.

I don’t think time has been “ripped asunder, into two discrete lines”. Not only have the producers stated we are not watching parallel timelines but my blog post does a fairly good job explaining the FS will be the new reality and will serve as the epilogue to the show. An epilogue the producers knew back in Season 1 they could not show AFTER the climatic events of the last episode. http://www.unovis.com/index.php/archives/24

And about chaos….an observer of a chaotic event, observed for the first time cannot know where it is going. It precludes prediction of the final event. You can study the event afterward and conclude that the seemingly unpredictable nature of the events did lead to the specific point and that it will always lead to a specific point. In other words, to use the rock in a pond analogy, we know from multiple times of throwing a rock we cannot predict the ripples but can predict it will end calm. But the first time we threw the rock we had no idea what we can predict about the ending.

Speaking creatively about Lost, the viewers cannot predict where this is going anymore than Jacob and MIB can do it. Any prediction Jacob/MiB might have is not chaos but rather whatever powers they have. However, the creators of Lost have had 6 years or so to create the events and study in minutiae how it all works. THEY can most certainly place a butterfly any point in the show, have it invoke meaning that someone might construe as the butterfly event and be able to point afterwards to say that this was what led to the inevitable conclusion. After all, it is not Jacob/MiB or the little kid that is God…it is the creators of the show who are.

And I was thinking one other thing now. The act of viewing something changes that which is being viewed. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle) As the creators of Lost have finally finished the script for the last episode and are filming it now, once it gets to editing the show is no longer in their control. So they will no longer be able to react to people writings and theories on the show and make changes so that someone did not predict the ending long ago. This will be the first time in history of the show where what we write can be proven correct or incorrect without the ability of the creators to manipulate the results.

It’s possible I found the trigger for the events I theorized in an earlier post. On Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune’s blog about the lastest episode of Lost (Richard’s episode Ab Aeterno) she questioned the significance of the butterfly. Truthfully, I do not even recall the butterfly at all and have not gone back to rewatch the episode.

However, in thinking about the question, the first thing that comes to mind is the classic Chaos theory example involving a butterfly. As (probably) shown in The Butterfly Effect movie (which I never saw) and as explained in the book on Chaos theory the point of the butterfly in chaos was to show that a single simple event such a butterfly flapping its wings could have massive and dramatic effects elsewhere in the world.

Moreover, invoking the Chaos theory lead me to a better understanding of Lost. One of the basic tenets of Chaos is that unlike normal scientific studies where things are very predictable and repeatable, Chaos theory shows that seemingly random and highly unpredictable events can be shown to lead to a predictable state. For example, throw a large rock into a small pond. The waves move out to the sides and bounce back in a very complex and unpredictable way but never-the-less the pond slowly settles down to being peaceful.

As applied to Lost it does seem to me that characters and events are very random and very unpredictable but that we are heading to a rather predictable state. Moreover, the butterfly as used in Lost I originally thought had no meaning other than to lazily (as the butterfly effect connection seems obvious to me) invoke the chaos theory. But it could be something else.

Assuming the creators did it for a specific reason and not just because they wanted to show a butterfly, I think the placement of the butterfly could be very significant. I now think they are trying to show that Richard’s landing on the island and the rescue by MIB is the butterfly effect. That this one little event will cause massive and dramatic effects later on. And I think the evidence in the show itself backs this up. Jacob seems to imply or flat out state (I cannot remember) that he had no plans for trying to influence events. But Richard convinces him to try to do so. And thus from this point on Jacob watches and manipulates events to bring about the story we have watched these past few years.

As for my earlier blog post about the trigger event for causing the FS to become reality, I now believe Richard is the event. That it will be shown in the next few episodes that Richard’s choice will change. He won’t convince Jacob to becoming pro-active and thus nothing we saw occurs and thus the FS is now reality as I explained before. How does this “choice” get made? It could be an actual choice by him. He could die on the boat. He could even not leave Canary Island. Something could cause this but who knows what.

Furthermore if Richard is the trigger and not killing Jacob as I speculated before then its Jacob’s choice to become pro-active that is the key to the events and not the existence or non-existince of Jacob and the MIB. In other words, they can still exist in their tug of war until Dharma sinks the island. I still think my original idea about them not being around in 2000’s is more likely but either thing can happen if its Jacob’s choice that causes the FS to become the new reality.

So I post that long post about Lost….I tell many people to go there and read it and I did not know that comments did not work. I restored the original theme and they work now. I will try to put back the cool theme I had on site but the ability to place comments is more important for now.

I keep up on the theories of Lost more than some but certainly less than others. But I do not recall seeing someone approach the show like I will in this blog posting. While I do care about why the events on the island are occurring I will leave the meaning of these events to my betters. I want to take a different approach to the show.

Years ago when Lost started I would casually think about how this can possibly end. And here we are getting to the end of the show. It dawned on me recently that this has to end one way.

Let us assume two things:

1) The Flash Sideways (FS) will be used for something. The show won’t end with the FS being just a wasted 30 minutes of each episode. Or that we could have ended the season with 8 fewer episodes or whatever…
2) I don’t think the producers will be throwing us for a twist at the last minute. In other words we won’t get to the final 30 minutes of the show and find out Ben was a woman, gave birth to Jack and the story was all in Kate’s head. The show will end in a reasonable and normal story fashion.

So how will it end? No idea… lol.

Ok…Let’s assume we had to write this show ourselves. We need to do one particular thing. We need to keep people watching and entertained until the very last minute. What we cannot do is have the audience be bored and change the channel. Moreover, the ending cannot be so easy that the audience can figure it out before hand and then sit there just waiting for the inevitable ending. Furthermore we cannot spend time on the aftermath. If the producers learned one thing from Lord of the Rings it will be the ending cannot drag on and on. Even though I will argue LOTR:RotK’s ending was just tidying up the storylines in a proper fashion the reality of TV is that people will turn the channel if Lost ends at 8:15 and still has 2 hours left.

So, the show needs to do a few things:
1) Keep people watching in a dramatic fashion until the very last minute.
2) Make the story be complex and interesting enough that the audience does not completely figure it out before the show ends.
3) And somehow the show must be able to show the aftermath of the events without forcing the audience to stick around for an “extra” episode or to read ancillary material (comic/novels etc).

Given all of the constraints of a final show here is what I see as creatively having to happen. The FS will be reality. The show, sometime near the end if not the very ending, will have some mechanism to cause the events we have seen not to occur. In other words the show will reset like the end of Season 5. Will the mechanism be killing Jacob in the past? Maybe…but it does not matter. The actual mechanism does not matter to the creative question of HOW to produce the show. It only matters to the actual plot and I won’t bother trying to figure that out.

So my point is, somehow in the past something will occur that resets time so that the events we think of as real life (RL) do not happen. And the FS is the result of this event. The audience will have seen the aftermath of what occurs in the shows climax.

Ok…so now we know the ending will be making the FS “real”. However many years ago, in the producers “real life”, when they came up with the ending they had to have known it could not be just thrown at the audience. They needed to set this up somehow…so they figured they would need about 3 seasons to tell the story properly and set up the ability to do this. First they have to set up the Flash Forward in time (end of season 3?). Then establish the ability to go back and forth in time (Desmond’s cool episode). And finally they show that they can actually jump in time (Season 5).

So the producers take the ending they need to have. A story of Jacob and whomever else. And creatively they work backwards trying to figure out the bullet points of where the story needs to go. So they figure X number of episodes to pull this off. And finally they decide with ABC to end the show and that they will have time to pull this off. So now they can start all the weird stuff we the audience need to see so that in the last episode someone (the last candidate?) goes back in time or causes an event back in time to occur and thus Flight 815 never crashes and everyone’s lives go on as we see in the FS.

Is this possible? Why not. Is there a lot of loose ends; like people need to do things in the future etc? Not really. Let me say that all of the RL we have seen will happen. People got off the island….things in the future happened. Things in the past happened etc… Life moved forward and gets to a point where something in the past gets changed. Just like Back to the Future the things in the future AFTER that event will change. Is there a paradox in that the future event does not happen so the triggering event could not happen? I don’t think so. I believe the timeline can move forward and the RL future does happen and the events lead to the triggering event and that changes everything afterwards. And after that, people that were dead could now be alive. Some people could die that were alive. Anything can happen. But the key thing here is that “What happened, happened”. In other words even though it cannot happen again it DID happen at one time.

Of course there are tons of questions to be answered. But I am solely discussing the creative mechanisms around how they can write and produce the show. I have no special insight on the story that causes the trigger, the meanings behind any of it, the metaphors etc. This is strictly just supposing the show will have some event that causes something so that the FS will be the aftermath and the new reality.

I also want to say that I don’t think the FS has any special meanings. People are analyzing the FS for every bit of meaning between the RL and the FS changes. Could there be meaning and ideas at work here? Certainly. But I laughed at the final reveal of the Numbers. For years people have analyzed the Numbers and sought meaning behind them and they meant nothing. They are just a list of numbers that go with the Candidates. Nothing else. As I said, I laughed at this because I saw the producers sitting there giggling as they wrote it….”How about we have the Numbers mean nothing? lol….Won’t that be hilarious after all the years??? LOL”. Seriously…even though I was shocked at this; it made sense. Had they tried to place more significance behind the numbers than they did it would have likely been disappointing. As it is now, the Numbers mean nothing but do still have a very significant purpose. I feel the same about the FS. Ultimately it has no meaning and it will just be the new reality.

In writing this someone post mentioned the producers denying the FS is a parallel universe. I agree with this. The end of season 5 did NOT cause a split. These two timelines are NOT running concurrently; in parellel. They are merely a dramatic device used by the creators in order to give the audience a very satisfying ending. In this I mean that at the end of the show, the trigger will occur and the FS is now the new reality. And we, the audience will have seen close to 8 hours of aftermath and will know how the lives of most, if not all, of the people on the show end up. And they did it by not wasting one moment of the last episode to show this. And moreover, they did it by giving the audience massive amounts of information to discuss while watching the season and afterwards.

I want to mention some other things. In the last broadcast episode, Ben and his father discussed being in Dharma. And leaving them. It is clear to me that the triggering event was a LONG time in the past but that the island still existed. Dharma went there and did things. Built their village etc. Ben and his father left for whatever reason and possibly left the Dharma. The Dharma continued drilling and caused some event that probably caused the island to sink as we saw in S6 E1 cut to commercial scene. And since Ben and his father left Dharma they do not know what eventually happened and thus the conversation they had speculating about their future if they had stayed in Dharma was just the writers having fun with the new FS “reality”.
And about the cut island sinking scene, what that scene did not show is what timeline that was but I think it was part of the FS. The producers claim some evidence is in that scene but to my understanding no one has found the evidence yet. Maybe after reading this we can see something in it…

I also want to point out a couple of flaws or inconsistencies in my theory. I do mostly claim the triggering event that cause the FS will be the last thing we see. That could be wrong. For all I know it could happen in tonight’s episode. And the rest of the season will be more future from the point of view of everyone in the FS stories. What I am saying is that this could happen at any point between now and the end of the series. I just claim that for creative purposes as stated at the beginning of this post that the FS will be the new reality. When this occurs I have no idea. But I think due to it being too obvious at some point it won’t be the final thing in the show. Moreover, I do not think it will be too early. If they end the Jacob storyline sooner than later and we then have to see multiple episodes of the FS future, I am not sure where the story is that will make the episodes dramatically sustainable. Of course they can do anything so it is impossible for me to speculate where the story can go plot wise…

Also wrong with my theory is ….lol….after all this writing I lost my train of thought. Maybe I will think of it later tonight… 🙂

There are a bunch of shows I cannot place in the timeline I previously posted. Not to mention that I don’t include the tons of small club type shows I saw. I saw Aslan/Psychotic Waltz dozens of times as I ended up working for them. I saw Assassin and Bible Black and other local metal bands numerous times. So in between the big shows I listed there was many, many smaller shows.

But this post will try to list all the shows I saw from bands people have heard of. Hopefully I can get the dates filled in and placed into the timeline: